Because I have tried it at least four different times starting WAY back when…a decade or more? Most recently with a full pro account via a bundle puchase.
All I see is this ugly monstrosity trying to be all things to all people but succeeding at nothing in particular apart from, well, success itself if we measure it by the ludicrous, bloated sprawl that continues unabated, and the money that is presumably being poured into it by the people who have been drinking the kool-aid and have been convinced that it is providing the best possible solution for something. What that might be I cannot imagine, outside of a desire for excess in all things or a need to turn everything into a challenge.
Clearly, mine is not the overwhelmingly agreed-upon view. So can anyone help me understand?
I have the free version on my phone and desktop and find it useful for small notes and photo-notes.
I have any number of projects for which it is useful to be able to jot down names, dates, small thoughts and observations, and EverNote on my phone makes that easy to do - even if I’m just upstairs reading the paper. Having the notes automagically appear in my desktop edition means I don’t even have to fumble with my phone to obtain them while working.
We use a household whiteboard for shopping and to-dos, and it’s been a perpetual source of friction as Mrs. B. won’t use, say, a legal pad and that means everything has to be selectively transcribed every time someone goes out on errands. (White boards not being terribly pocketable, you see.) I’ve found EverNote’s photo-note feature a perfect tool - I snap a shot of the board on the way out and I have absolutely everything with me, even stuff I might think is unneeded or irrelevant until I happen to pass a hardware store.
But I’ve never been much on PIMs and the like and don’t use more than that tiny subset of its features.
I don’t use it much now, but in grad school I used it to keep papers, research, class notes, etc. organized and easy to access anywhere. It’s good when you need to keep track of a truly enormous amount of information that doesn’t have an obvious structure.
It came to me as a MS OneNote vs Evernote dichotomy. I wanted to love Evernote, but I couldn’t quite grasp how to use it, whereas OneNote only took 5 minutes to learn, so that was that.
I use the free version of Evernote. I have the browser extension on my computer and the Android app on my phone. It’s quite handy for jotting down notes and having access to them basically anywhere, anytime.
I’m not emotionally wedded to Evernote. If there is some other better way of allowing me to enter and access the same set of notes across my iPhone, iPad, any home desktop and my work desktop, I’m all ears.
I’m experimenting with Evernote right now, using it as a lab notebook. It seems to be OK but I’m having a hard time fitting it into my workflow. It’s easy enough to type up what I’m going to do while sitting at a desk, but I still need paper to record what I’ve actually done at the bench or microscope. Even small laptops are pretty awkward to use in either case.
Currently I’m lusting after a Surface Pro 3, or if I can’t save enough of my pennies a Galaxy Note Pro, so I can have a tablet with a stylus that I can actually carry to the bench (with a big enough screen for reading 8.5 x 11 PDFs). If I go the Surface route I’ll give OneNote a try to take advantage of the integration, but I think my PI would prefer if everyone used Evernote since it has better cross-platform support and lots of lab members are Mac users.
At work I use One Note, but at that time their mobile app was pretty sub par. So I started using Evernote to tie my work computer to my phone to my IPad. I mostly just use Evernote to keep grocery lists and recipes (since I can pull it up easily at the store) and a few other small things. I use One Note for everything else.
Having answered along with enough others, I guess I have to ask the OP: what makes you perceive a kool-aid effect with EN? I don’t see any more push for it, or ads and emails and such, than any of a number of other products that are marketing-driven. I was frankly a little surprised at your post. Are you in an environment of users or IT folks shoving it on everyone?
I guess I’m one of the kool-aid drinkers. I use the free versions across several platforms (Windows laptops, Android phone, and iPad), and I even have an Evernote app on my smartwatch that lets me access my notes right on my wrist. Mostly I use it to take notes at meetings and conferences: I type much faster than I write, and I prefer to use my iPad for notes (with a Bluetooth keyboard it’s just as easy as typing on a laptop, only lighter and smaller). Then I can access those notes from anywhere.
I also use frequently use it as a jazz singer: I keep a list of my songs and keys, and it’s great to be able to pull that up anywhere (and only have one master list to maintain). Actually the biggest reason I installed the app on my watch was for this.
Never used Evernote so can’t comment on it but I do use Google Keep. It works well across my nexus phone, laptop and desktop. I use it mostly to keep notes on my work projects but also for running lists and quick notes (the name of that artist and piece of music, etc) Have’t tried the voice dictation feature but it uses Google Voice which seems to work fine in other applications. It is pretty simple and does not have an export feature (cut and paste works). Integration with drive is poor to the point of being useless compared to just cutting and pasting.
Sounds like it is quite primitive compared to Evernote but it might be a good alternative for some of you. It is Google so who knows- it could be completely ruined or discontinued with their next update.
I wanted to be into it, but I would never remember what or how or why I would want to use it. It just seems like fun, kind of like when PDA’s came out and I got one for who knows what reason.
If you don’t need it, you don’t need it. Some people just don’t work with “notes” of any kind. No need to try to shoehorn them into your methods.
OTOH, Mrs. B. is one of the most technophobic people I know, the sort who has a tech-breaking aura around her. I very tentatively gave her a Palm one year early in their heyday, and after an initial, “Gee… uh… thanks…” she didn’t put it down for the next six years. It was THE perfect tool for her massive and fluctuating field schedule.
There does seem to be a category of people, particularly among “lifehacker” types, that get really into various structured methods of life organization, and these commonly include Evernote. These people can be extremely tedious so I can sympathize with the kool-aid comments.
That said, I use Evernote from time to time for simple stuff. It works, though it’s not perfect.
My main problem with it is that it doesn’t pair well with all the other stuff that’s associated with a particular project. When I write a program or design a part to be machined or create a circuit design, I need notes. But I want those notes to live with the rest of the project, not separated into a corporate data silo that I don’t control.
Is there even a way to export all of my data to a local file? If there is, I can’t find it. Therefore I don’t put anything truly important there–everything of value of mine is backed up in multiple locations. I certainly don’t trust Evernote enough to hold a monopoly on my important stuff.
I just noticed that Evernote has a beta of their new web interface. In short, it represents everything I hate about modern UI design. Acres of useless white space, and anything useful is hidden by default behind impenetrable icons. What once took one click now takes three, and worse, because the UI elements (like the notebook and notes lists) don’t show themselves until clicked on, I have to visually scan the list for the thing I want each time I bring up the list. Before, they would sit quietly in my peripheral vision, and I could always have a basic idea of where the important stuff sits. Obviously, they’ve also added loathsome animations to everything, wasting even more of my time.
If they ever force this new UI, I’ll certainly stop using Evernote. Text files work just fine for me, and I can sync them to the cloud almost as easily as in Evernote.
We use it at work. It’s a good way for a small team to post regular status updates on our daily projects and to create checklists for the myriad small tasks that we need to get done over the course of a day. That said, I use it because my boss selected it; I didn’t compare it to anything else.